I remember my reply: ‘That’s bad news, Mr. Cousins. But now I’ve got to get back to work on my next one, and let’s hope it’s better.’ I had sworn that I would never be elated by praise or downcast by a drubbing, and this was the first test case. True to my word, I went back to my typewriter, for I still had much to say about my world.
When Burns’s review of The Fires of Spring appeared, it was as if vitriol had been mixed with the ink. But the attack had almost no effect upon me, nor upon the book, for it sold about as well as might have been expected—not heavily—and it lived on to become the book of mine about which more people write to me than any other.
But what Burns did to me seemed like a kindness compared with what the older and established critics did to his second novel. Never in my memory had they come so close to total annihilation of an author’s work. His Lucifer with a Book was a savage, kinky, vengeful account of a sadistic boys’ private school, and the book was so avant-garde and focused on sex, sometimes of an exhibitionistic character, that the critics found the work revolting. At least one major newspaper lambasted not only Burns but also the publisher who had had the temerity to offer the book, claiming that in doing so the company had grievously offended public morals. I read it and found it a logical extension of themes and directions toward which Burns had been moving in his first book, and I was outraged that a critic and a newspaper would use their power to abuse a writer for serious work that would have been accepted without a murmur in France, Germany or Sweden. (Now the book would occasion nary a ripple.)
I wrote to the editor of the book section protesting such a blatant attempt at censorship, but the letter was not published, nor, as far as I know, did any other writers spring to Burns’s defense, leaving his public reputation somewhat tarnished.
For some time I lost sight of Burns, but having met him only that brief time during the photographing session I doubt that I would have recognized him had I passed him on the street. Then I heard that after the blistering reviews his book had received, he left the country and was traveling around Europe. I heard rumors that he had dropped down to North Africa and then, some years later, that he was trying to write at a village hideout in France. Since I myself was traveling extensively in these years, I lost track of where he actually was, but I heard that his writing was not going well, and then that he had died, but where, or how, or in what circumstance I never really knew. Rumors were plentiful and they centered upon whether or not he had committed suicide, or if as one cynic phrased it: ‘He had encouraged suicide to happen,’ which was the same suggestion that had been made regarding Tom Heggen’s death. Finally a semiauthoritative statement appeared in print: ‘John Horne Burns, American novelist, died of a cerebral hemorrhage at Leghorn, Italy, at the age of thirty-six.’ Whatever the cause of death, this luminous talent was gone.
Then I began to appreciate the great loss I had suffered, for men often thrive when they have competitors against whom to test themselves, and had Burns lived I am sure he and I would have competed, honorably and vigorously, throughout our lives, each checking what the other was doing, meeting now and then as adversaries and in time as friends, each going his unique way, each presenting a mirror-image of the other. He would have been one of the notable esthetes, I a stolid representative of the stable middle class; he a writer of traceries and shadowy intimations, I of conflicts in blazing sunlight; he the head of a coterie and immensely popular in universities, where his acerbic wit would be appreciated and encouraged, I off by myself plugging away at my own goals. Side by side we would have marched through the decades, and tears fill my eyes when I think of the enormous loss I and the world suffered with his death. My alter ego had vanished in the mists of sunset. I think of John Horne Burns every week of my life.
Lockridge, Heggen and Burns were my tragic trio, the ones who were so important in the first years of my writing, but there was another trio that was at times hilarious and a proper counterweight to tragedy. Their importance in any evaluation of American writing in this period lay in the masterly way they handled publicity, converting themselves into public figures and enhancing their relative importance a hundredfold. I envy them their performances, because they were the Andy Warhols of the writing profession.
Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal and Truman Capote have been of great importance to me because they performed in public in ways that I could not. To understand exactly what I mean by this, you must accompany me to MacArthur’s occupied Japan in the years 1947–1957, when a group of average military American men and their wives attained enormous social power and lived in fine expropriated homes. To prove to the cultured Japanese leaders that not all Americans were boors, they began to invite to their parties a capable piano player, who offered light classical music as well as a French expatriate master of woodblock prints who had lived in Japan for many years and was known for his flamboyant art and shocking personal appearance. Paul Jacolet was a portly sybarite who kept his face covered with the white rice-powder makeup used by kabuki actors. He favored outrageous costumes, sometimes ornate Japanese kimonos such as women might wear, at other times wildly colored velvet jackets in bright green or purple, with skintight trousers of some clashing color, and bright red shoes of fantastic design. He had a mincing walk, but one look at his amazing dress and face and you knew he was an artist. He made himself a fixture at the American military parties I attended; few remembered his name—he was known simply as ‘the artist.’
Jacolet was invaluable because he represented in this austere military society the other world of which the generals and colonels could never be a part but which, because they were men of good sense, they knew they ought to honor. Every society needs artists to remind itself of the finer things of life, and two aspects of this problem have fascinated me: when American businessmen and political leaders visit Europe with their wives, even though they have never attended to the arts at home, they feel obligated to visit the haunts of Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy and Beethoven because they recognize intuitively that those were the men of their day who really mattered; and although most of us know Vincent van Gogh in Arles and Paul Gauguin in Tahiti as if they were neighbors, somewhat disreputable but endlessly fascinating, none of us can name two French generals or department store owners of that period. I take enormous pride in considering myself an artist, one of the necessaries.
In the United States in my generation it has been Mailer, Vidal and Capote who have played the very important role of symbolizing the writing artist for the public. Who automatically visualizes Saul Bellow or John Updike as an ‘artist’ or a ‘novelist?’ They seem more like university professors or stockbrokers, but neither Norman Mailer nor Truman Capote could be mistaken for such. They behaved like outrageous Pucks, who entertained us with their antics. They were also outspoken critics and sly commentators, but in that role they have been excelled by Gore Vidal, whose patrician sneer and acerbic wit have been a tonic. I have met scores of people who have read none or few of his books who treasure his appearances on television: ‘He is such a breath of fresh air.’ And his comments on politics have been invaluable.
I used to think that the Norman Mailer of The Naked and the Dead, published when he was twenty-five, was merely a sensationally successful one-book author, and his first books thereafter seemed to prove that. But he revealed himself as a protean man with the widest possible interests and the skill to tackle them all, from pertinent comments on politics to a biography of Marilyn Monroe. As if that were not enough, he lived a daring, exhibitionistic life fraught with scandal. A graduate of Harvard, he was indubitably an artist, and with his mop of unruly hair and and his outrageous behavior, he conformed to the general public’s impression of what an artist should look like. He has been invaluable to American life because he is an authentic American voice.
Gore Vidal, who wrote Williwaw at only nineteen, was another whose early book could well have been his last, but instead he wrote a series of books that varied in subject matter from the critical da
ys of early Christianity to the dramatic eras of American history to outrageous sexual games. I envy him two novels on whose subjects I also did a great deal of work: Julian, which deals with the apostate who tried to turn back Christianity in ancient Antiochea, and 1876, which covers the amazing incident in American history that year when the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes stole the presidential election from the Democrat Samuel J. Tilden. Vidal knows how to make the most of his material, whatever the source, and I would have been proud to have written either of these books I’ve cited. I am especially impressed by his ability to engage in politics, for his periodic excursions into that field can be both entertaining and instructive. Himself a candidate for Congress at one time, and the descendant of important national figures, he has a wide range of information, a delicious smattering of prejudice and a ready tongue, and that mix makes for lively results. He has been an important participant in national debates, and a refreshing one.
Truman Capote was a raffish fellow who devoted his life to self-promotion, but since he had a firm base of elegant writing, it was not mere exhibitionism. His first book, Other Voices, Other Rooms, published when he was twenty-four and accompanied by that famous photograph of him stretched out on a chaise longue, catapulted him to both literary and social fame, and he remained a major celebrity until his untimely death. With an engaging lisp, a high-pitched voice, a languid manner and a coruscating wit, he became the darling of the television talk shows. He was incomparably the writer turned public performer, the American Jean Cocteau, but, unlike mere poseurs, he was always able to back up his public performances with his fine writing. In his tour de force In Cold Blood, Capote stunned me with his ability to remove himself almost completely from the narration so that the reportage became totally impersonal. That a man who flaunted his personality could have been so self-effacing was amazing.
I knew Capote slightly and once had an amusing contretemps involving him. When his Breakfast at Tiffany’s became famous because of the movie made with Audrey Hepburn, a New York woman with a name much like the heroine’s, Holly Golightly, started a lawsuit against Truman for invasion of privacy. As it happened, I had been dating the specific girl on whom Truman had based his character and I wrote Bennett Cerf a long letter informing him that I would be willing to testify in Truman’s behalf in his defense against the New York claimant, because I personally knew the young woman on whom the tale was really based. When Bennett got my letter he called me and shouted over the telephone: ‘For Christ’s sake, Jim, tear up all copies of your letter. Truman’s afraid that your girl is going to sue him, too.’ The suit was either dropped or adjudicated and Truman heard no more threats from either girl.
One afternoon as I was leaving Random House after reviewing the copy-edited manuscript of one of my novels, I passed the newsstand in the lobby and stopped short with a gasp—there on the front page of a newspaper was a raffish picture of Truman Capote leering from beneath the brim of his rakish Borsalino. Below were just four lines of type:
I am a drunkard
I am a dope addict
I am a homosexual
I am a genius
Truman, I thought, had carried his campaign perhaps a little too far, and then I thought ruefully that whereas the public would probably applaud Capote for his frankness, it had castigated John Horne Burns for having dared to do in 1949 a hundredth of what Capote was doing in 1979.
American letters would have been a drab affair without the three men I have discussed, because they did what other more reticent writers could not do—they reminded the public that artists are a different breed, that they need breathing room, that sometimes they are not bound by normal rules of behavior.
I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a successful manuscript and seeing it become a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.
And then there are those who want to write mainly for the gratification of being published. One of these was a Denver dentist named Dr. Deppard, who received from a grateful patient a bequest of $4,800. Dr. Deppard came to me as a longtime friend and shyly announced that he had always wanted to write a book, and had indeed started one. It dealt with the relationships between a dentist and his patients and was, he assured me, both heartwarming and filled with useful information presented in swiftly moving episodes built around interesting characters. He was sure that millions would be eager to buy his book, and I noticed that he was already thinking commercially, for he said buy, not read.
When Dr. Deppard showed me his manuscript, three pages sufficed to prove that it was totally hopeless, but I had a deal with my book editor at Random House and my agent that I would refer to them all such manuscripts. In due course my editor wrote back to the dentist advising him ‘that at this particular time Random House could express no interest in the manuscript.…
Dr. Deppard was a determined man, and I provided him with the addresses of other New York publishers, all of whom replied as Random House had. After about the sixth rejection he came to me despondent, asking me what to do next, and it was apparent that he would never accept the fact that his manuscript was unpublishable. When I said there was nothing more I could do, he glared at me and said: ‘I thought you were my friend.’
A few weeks later there arrived in Denver one of the memorable figures in American publishing, J. Pitt Barclay, owner and chief executive officer of Vanitatis Press, located at a Madison Avenue address in New York. Placing a small advertisement in the local papers to alert the would-be writers of Denver that he was in town and would be pleased to meet anyone with a publishable manuscript, he waited in his suite at the Brown Palace Hotel. One of the first in line was Dr. Deppard, who unfortunately began his interview with these bell-ringing words: ‘A dear patient died some months ago leaving me a totally unexpected bequest of forty-eight hundred dollars, and I said to myself: “Deppard, this is a chance to write that great book you’ve always had in mind,” and I wondered if you would be interested—’
‘Sounds just like the kind of book we’ve been looking for,’ Barclay said, ‘the sort of thing a health-conscious public will be avid to grab and recommend to their friends.’ He said that he would take the manuscript back to the home office, where he would ask one of America’s foremost experts on the salability of books, his senior editor F.X. Grimble, to take a look at it and give his honest opinion. Within a surprisingly few days Dr. Deppard received one of the epistolary masterpieces of our time, which he promptly showed me. As I read it I thought: No wonder Deppard’s excited:
Dear Dr. Deppard,
Last night as I was leaving our office in midtown New York, I was stopped by our senior editor, F.X. Grimble, who ran up to me breathless to say: ‘J.P., at last we have a book we can run with. This manuscript you handed me from the dentist in Denver has everything, and I mean everything, that we’ve been looking for. Please get it for us and allow us to make a splash.’
Now if I have learned anything about publishing in my thirty-three years at the head of a major firm, it is to listen to F.X. when he gets really excited about a project. Never does he fail me, so I took the manuscript home with me, and that was one of the biggest mistakes I ever made, for I had intended to sit in my easy chair by the smoldering fire, drink mulled cider and read Joseph Conrad’s Victory, but I never saw a word of Conrad that night, because I opened your manuscript first, and toward four in the morning when the fire had guttered low and the mulled cider was drained, I turned over the last page and said: ‘F.X. was right, this is truly a book we could run with.’
There were five more paragraphs of the most seductive writing I had read in many years, all the intimations that J.Pitt Barclay and F.X. Grimble were hovering on the edge of publishing history if they could but land this manuscript. And Barclay made a most e
nticing offer:
Dr. Deppard, F.X. and I assembled all our manufacturing experts this morning and they told me they thought it would be possible for us to publish your fine manuscript if you could help us with the cost of the paper, a mere $4,800, a sum which we feel sure you will earn back many times over.
The letter’s one-line closing was calculated to make Dr. Deppard’s heart pound: ‘I cannot guarantee you either fortune or fleeting fame, but I can promise you something infinitely more valuable: Immortality.’
Confident that Vanitatis had a live prospect on the hook, J.P. began tightening his net with a trick that had often proved effective; he included in the letter as if by accident, the carbon of a report from an Eleanore, obviously in the publicity department, and marked F.Y.E.O. (for your eyes only) CONFIDENTIAL. It listed some twenty of the best-known publications in the country to which advance copies would be airmailed, a dozen television stations from which she and the author would choose for personal appearances, and the seven big-market cities to which they would want to send the author, ‘but only to the best radio shows and the biggest stores.’ Eleanore’s report ended: ‘Please, J.P., get this book for us. We’ve been hungry for something we could really get our teeth into.’
As soon as Deppard received this letter he xeroxed it and sent a copy off to each of the legitimate publishers to whom he had sent the manuscript earlier and who had all rejected it with form letters: ‘See,’ he said. ‘It’s like I told you. This is a wonderful book. Its possibilities are endless, just like he says. Do you want to reconsider?’ No one did, but my editor, Albert Erskine, told me rather brusquely ‘The hell of Barclay’s Vanitatis operation is that when these pitiful characters receive his letter, they always double back on us for a second opinion and we have to answer their letters.’ He did not implore me to stop pestering him with such submissions, but on my own I decided to quit.
The World Is My Home: A Memoir Page 47